always plucked at him; "for you know he
hates me," said Garrick. Junius, offended
by an indiscretion, threatened him with the
statute still in force, which would treat him
as a vagabond, and deal with him as a rogue.
Kenrick libelled him; actresses struck work,
pouted, rebelled, and created schisms in the
green-room and on the stage; all sorts of
annoying little shadows fell darkling upon the
edges of his glory, but still the central light
remained the same, and even increased as time
went on. He had some ingratitude to contend
with, as of course; and among those who repaid
favours with frowns was the intemperate and
unscrupulous Arthur Murphy. Rogers used to
tell one unvarying anecdote about Murphy,
which some of our readers may have heard at
first hand. "Mr. Murphy, sir, you knew Mr.
Garrick?"—"Yes, sir, I did; and no man
better."—"Well, sir, what did you think of
his acting?"—After a pause, "Well, sir, off
the stage he was a mean sneaking little fellow;
but on the stage"—throwing up his hands and
eyes"oh my great God!" "This was the
invariable formula," adds Mr. Fitzgerald:
"nothing less general could be obtained from him."

If he had enemies, however, he sometimes
deserved them, for he often committed follies,
and more than one fault to help. For though Mr.
Fitzgerald amiably tries to show him as heroic
throughout, the general voice of contemporary
history is too loud, and its verdict too uniform,
to be easily silenced or upset. What this latest
biographer insists on as lawful thrift does
indeed seem to have been rank parsimony; what
he says was sweetness of temper reads
marvellously like meanness of spirit; while the justice
and placidity he praises so constantly look more
like that universal cringe which will not see an
insult, even when grossly evident, and which dreads
nothing so much as to offend. But, saint or sinner,
he did good work in the world so far as his
own profession went; he did more to raise the
stage than any man who had then lived, and his
very pride in always insisting on his gentlehood
was a help to the "vagabonds" he
represented. We owe it primarily to Garrick that
the stage has come to be looked on as a
profession like any other profession; that actors and
actresses are allowed to be gentlefolks, although
actors and actresses; that purity of living and
the footlights can go together; and that
Bohemianism and vagabondism and riot and rascality,
are not necessarily the adjuncts of a calling which
has included some of the noblest women and
most honourable men among its followers.

Garrick took his leave of the stage on June
the 10th, 1776. He played Don Felix, in
The Wonder, and had such a leave-taking as
no actor ever had before, and none since. It
was like the parting of lovers when he said
adieu to his old friends in pit and gallery, and
was almost as pathetic. He did not live long
after this uprooting—not more than two years
and a half; dying of a painful malady on the
20th of January, 1779. His savings amounted
to nearly a hundred thousand pounds; but he
did not leave the whole to his wife. She had a
good provision; his relations were also thought
of, though not one personal friend. She had
the two houses at Hampton and the house at
the Adelphi. At Hampton, which she allowed
to get into sad disrepair, she was often visited
by Queen Charlotte and the king. The queen
found her once peeling onions, and took a knife
and began to peel onions with her. She was
generally surrounded by her "hundred head of
nieces," as Miss Berry called them, and lived
in excellent preservation till October the 16th,
1822, when she died without a sigh, quite
quietly and quite suddenly, as she was
contemplating her dresses laid out for her to choose
from for that night's wearing. She was going
to see Drury Lane, newly decorated by Elliston,
and perhaps the little flutter of the anticipation
was too much for her.

A DISCREET REPORT.

"THERE is," writes Dr. Jonathan Swift, "no
talent so useful towards rising in the world, or
which puts men more out of the power of
fortune, than that quality generally possessed by
the dullest sort of men, and in common speech
called 'discretion;' a species of lower prudence,
by the assistance of which people of the meanest
sort of intellects pass through the world in
great tranquillity, neither giving nor taking
offence." A report by the medical officer of
the Poor Law Board upon forty-eight
provincial workhouses in England and Wales, is
redolent of this useful quality. In every one
of its hundred and fifty-seven pages, its author,
Dr. Edward Smith, skates upon thin ice with
a dexterity which speaks volumes for his
official training; and, with his colleague or chief,
Mr. H. Fleming, invites appreciative praise.
This latter gentleman, as secretary of the Poor
Law Board, framed the official instructions to
Dr. Smith in a letter, which is a model of "lower
prudence." The object being to combine a
show of candour with a reality of concealment,
these sixteen ounces of blue book are worth, not
the paltry one-and-eightpence charged for
them, but their weight in gold.

First, as to their origin. The country had
been visited with one of those unpleasant
spasms of conscientiousness which are the bane
of faulty systems. The starving, the poisoning,
the torturing, and the killing of workhouse
inmates had been exposed in parliament and
by the press. Men had asked angrily who was
responsible? and The Department had, in reply,
issued a dignified protest against sensationalism.
But this did not wholly satisfy the country.
The several districts in which barbarism had
been proved were known to be controlled
nominally by the inspectors of the Poor Law Board,
and a dim notion took possession of the public
mind that the duties of these gentlemen, and of
the authorities over them, might, on the whole,
be more efficiently performed. Some active minds
went so far as to think that skilled knowledge